Zen Koans

I have been using display-dhammapada for some time now but I have always wanted a similar program for zen koans.

I came across a perl module on CPAN , “Zen Koans” and it was a nice start.

From there I added 2 more koan collections, The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Record, and wrote a wrapper script for these collections.

The wrapper script, “zen” has several options including printing to the terminal (similar to fortune or display-dhammapada), formatting the output to html, to be included in a web page, and printing the output to ~/koan.html to be viewed in firefox (or other browser).

For an example of the script on a web page see : tenach’s blog (thank you tenach for putting this up).

If anyone would like to offer improvements or help package them into a ppa , assistance would be appreciated (pm me on the Ubuntu Forms). Otherwise I will try to package them into a ppa as time allows.

i took a poke about your code. pretty neat idea, i liked it so i re-wrote it. :)

you can find zen-koans-zg.tar.gz at the website if you want to take a look. i’ve been doing Perl for too many years to count so i cleaned it up the way i would have written it mostly. didn’t want to get into rewriting the Zen::* modules that much, just made enough changes to make it easier to work with.

if you want to make a .deb backage, look at the SelfControl package on the same site, it’s not perfect, but it does have the full Perl module build/test/install/debhelper stuff in it. somehow it magically ended up in the Software Center.

Installing via CPAN is preferable for several reasons, it can fetch and install dependencies for you, it’s fairly simple to use and doesn’t require the user to copy files around their system. For example to install Zen::Koan open a terminal and type:

cpan Zen::Koan

If you you’re using the Perl which ships with Ubuntu you will need to use sudo. On this topic I’d suggest not using the system Perl, as Ubuntu uses it for various systemy bits and bobs. You can Simply download the source and build it with a prefix /home/username/perl. See the Installation note in the README for details.

Regarding packaging modules. Well you could simply pick one from CPAN and copy the layout. See also perlnewmod (which you can access via the command line using perldoc perlnewmod) and Creating and Distributing Modules.

Should you need help with anything mentioned above, or have any further Perl questions consider posting over at perlmonks where people are always happy to help.

I’m going to make something like you’re doing on this blog. A mouse in the kitchen got me out of bed, around 4:30 this morning. Making noises, eating my chocolate and granola. But now I’m happy enjoying a living Buddha:

Found your place by looking for an irc chat tutorial. The Dharma’s gotta go mobile. the terminal program is so 70s! Of course, I’m going back in tech time using irc… I’m interested in updating web and mobile devices with spiritual Teachings.